Posts Tagged 'Russia'

Slush.fi was a victim of its own success. In November 2012, the website home of Startup Sauna's early-stage startup conference was crippled by an unexpected flood of site traffic, and they had to take immediate action. Should they get a private MySQL instance from their current host to try and accommodate the traffic or should they move their site to the SoftLayer cloud? Spoiler (highlight for clue): You're reading this post on the SoftLayer Blog.

Let me back up for a second and tell you a little about Startup Sauna and Slush. Startup Sauna hosts (among other things) a Helsinki-based seed accelerator program for early-stage startup companies from Northern Europe and Russia. They run two five-week programs every year, with more than one hundred graduated companies to date. In addition to the accelerator program, Startup Sauna also puts on annually the biggest startup conference in Northern europe called Slush. Slush was founded in 2008 with the intent to bring the local startup scene together at least once every year. Now — five years later — Slush brings more international investors and media to the region than any other event out there. This year alone, 3,500 entrepreneurs, investors and partners who converged on Slush to make connections and see the region's most creative and innovative businesses, products and services.

In October of last year, we met the founders of Startup Sauna, and it was clear that they would be a perfect fit to join Catalyst. We offer their portfolio companies free credits for cloud and dedicated hosting, and we really try get to know the teams and alumni. Because Startup Sauna signed on just before Slush 2012 in November, they didn't want to rock the boat by moving their site to SoftLayer before the conference. Little did we know that they'd end up needing to make the transition during the conference.

When the event started, the Slush website was inundated with traffic. Attendees were checking the agenda and learning about some of the featured startups, and the live stream of the presentation brought record numbers of unique visitors and views. That's all great news ... Until those "record numbers" pushed the site's infrastructure to its limit. Startup Sauna CTO Lari Haataja described what happened:

The number of participants had definitely most impact on our operations. The Slush website was hosted on a standard webhotel (not by SoftLayer), and due to the tremendous traffic we faced some major problems. Everyone was busy during the first morning, and it took until noon before we had time to respond to the messages about our website not responding. Our Google Analytics were on fire, especially when Jolla took the stage to announce their big launch. We were streaming the whole program live, and anyone who wasn't able to attend the conference wanted to be the first to know about what was happening.

The Slush website was hosted on a shared MySQL instance with a limited number of open connections, so when those connections were maxed out (quickly) by site visitors from 134 different countries, database errors abounded. The Startup Sauna team knew that a drastic change was needed to get the site back online and accessible, so they provisioned a SoftLayer cloud server and moved their site to its new home. In less than two hours (much of the time being spent waiting for files to be downloaded and for DNS changes to be recognized), the site was back online and able to accommodate the record volume of traffic.

You've seen a few of these cautionary tales before on the SoftLayer Blog, and that's because these kinds of experiences are all too common. You dream about getting hundreds of thousands of visitors, but when those visitors come, you have to be ready for them. If you have an awesome startup and you want to learn more about the Startup Sauna, swing by Helsinki this week. SoftLayer Chief Strategy Officer George Karidis will be in town, and we plan on taking the Sauna family (and anyone else interested) out for drinks on January 31! Drop me a line in a comment here or over on Twitter, and I'll make sure you get details.